


Body Like a Hotel

by orphan_account



Category: Deathstroke the Terminator (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Allusions to Canon Character Deaths, Allusions to Child Abuse, Character Study, Declarations Of Love, M/M, Threats of Violence, pillowtalk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-21 11:10:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18141428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Dick says I love you.





	Body Like a Hotel

“I love you,” Dick whispered into the shell of Slade’s ear as sex-heady weariness tugged and toyed with their attempts to stay conscious. Slade’s eye was closed, laid out on his back, sweat still slick on his chest. Despite the room’s humidity, Dick wrapped himself around Slade, sliding a slippery leg between Slade’s and cupping Slade’s neck as he pressed a kiss to Slade’s temple.

Despite the damp blankets and Dick’s lube coated skin, despite the sweat and the heat and Dick’s crowding, Slade did not push Dick away and he did not loosen Dick’s hold. Dick had requested time, between the sex and a shower, so that his quaking muscles could calm and so that his breathing could even.

Well, so that his muscles could relax. Dick wasn’t doing much to catch his breath, whispering declarations of love and cooing praises. Sex made him tender and rosy-eyed, he couldn’t help it.

“I’m a lost cause, kid,” Slade rumbled, opening his eye to consider Dick. “Save your affection for someone like you, I don’t need it.” Still, Slade took to absently scratching the nape of Dick’s neck, as if he were an overexcited animal that needed calming. Dick didn’t feel overexcited, overstimulated maybe.

“I’ve got you figured out, Deathstroke,” Dick teased, hanging his head to arch his neck into Slade’s ministrations. “I’ve been profiling you since I was Robin.” That felt so long ago, so distant. Back when Robin was Dick’s, and back when the resentment was just beginning to bubble.

Back when Kori’s raw violence and convictions left Dick weak. She still made him weak, and she’d hate him for his morally ambiguous dalliances every bit as much as she loved him before. Helena was like that too; capable of baring her teeth just as easily as her crossbow. And Bruce, tender and cruel in the same breath. Occasionally, when surrounded by such unadulterated certainty, Dick felt like Helen of Sparta in the Iliad, moved about and made to attend to wills not his own. At least he could trust the goodness those wills imparted; Helen was shit out of luck.

Dick pressed his ear against Slade’s chest to match his own pulse to Slade’s steady rhythm.

Slade chuckled, and his finger tips drug from Dick’s hair to trace his vertebrae, leaving a trail of raised flesh. “Of that I have no doubt. But you’ve always mistaken standards for generous intent. I’ve got your number too, kid, don’t forget it.” 

“You’re a sociopath, but you’re not nearly as far down the spectrum as you want me or anyone else to believe,” Dick shot back. “The moment you acknowledge the extent of your morality, you’ll have to take responsibility for your actions, and you loathe personal responsibility.”

“You’d do more, and you’d do it better, without the the Bat, but you’re so hungry for affection that you stay tethered to a man whose personal mission, which he enforces on everyone in his vicinity, is a thinly veiled outlet for an innate propensity for violence,” Slade countered.

Dick was quiet for a moment. “And the kids,” he said, voice distant. “Last time I left him alone with the kids, Jason wound up dead. Although I guess they wind up dead anyway sometimes.”

“Yours came back. Don’t talk to me about dead kids, you don’t know shit,” Slade muttered, uncharacteristically bitter. Dick cringed, but Slade continued, “Batman has no right to the children he employs; this work has no place for our progeny.”

“I needed it, Slade,” Dick pleaded. “My parents—”

“Wouldn’t want this for you,” Slade asserted, sitting up and then slinging Dick underneath himself, so that he towered over Dick with the gravity of a mountain, caging Dick between his arms and glowering down so that his hair fell about his face. Dick couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t blink. He wandered if this was what it was like to be pinned by a lion.

“You’re a child soldier, Grayson,” Slade continued. “Bred to fight a deranged man’s fabricated war. Certainly bred against sleeping with mercenaries who want to hurt you.”

Dick reached up and entangled his fingers in Slade’s silver locks. “You don’t want to hurt me. Not without getting off, and you don’t like using sex to hurt.” Slade also had a terrible metric for harm, but Dick wasn’t about to say so.

“I do,” Slade insisted. “You’re moralistic and bothersome and naive. I want to hit you.”

“Yeah?” Dick goaded, eyes dark. “C’mon, what else?”

“I want to wring your thin neck until your cervical spine collapses underneath my grip,” Slade ground out, tracing the bob of Dick’s Adam’s apple. “I want to shake you like a rag doll.”

Dick arched his neck, to taunt. With a soft smile, he said, “But you don’t.”

“I don’t,” Slade conceded, falling heavily back onto the mattress, to stretch out next to Dick, to press against Dick’s side with an arm tossed possessively across Dick’s waist. “I can feel when I’m around you. You and Wintergreen.”

Dick rolled over to bury his face in Slade’s neck, threading his hand back in Slade’s hair. Slade cupped the back of Dick’s neck and rubbed circles into Dick’s skin.

“I love you too,” Dick sighed.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Slade’s behavior based on an interview with Christopher Priest + the fact that Slade is a dad, even if he’s bad at it. 
> 
> Also, to clarify the Aphrodite metaphor: Dick does a lot of shit (such as act as Batman) that he doesn’t want to do because he sees it as his duty. He also tends to be more morally flexible than literally anyone around him (even the other Robins get mad at him for it, the way he uses duplicity to get what he needs.) He also canonically scrutinizes and questions himself.  
> It makes me wonder how much he does to stay in the good graces of his more morally sure compatriots. There are some things he adopts with certainty but, uh, not so certainly that he doesn’t befriend those who violate his supposedly strict moral constitution.


End file.
